NEWS ANALYSIS : NEA’s Top Officials Assess the Impact of Funds Shift to States

Top officials of the National Endowment for the Arts are pondering a series of eviscerating program cuts in which some fixtures of the NEA might essentially vanish in a budget dance equivalent to a butterfly transforming itself into a caterpillar.

That is the impression left after a somber, two-day meeting of the NEA’s advisory National Council on the Arts that voted to recommend 1,000 grants worth a total of $46 million but warned endowment officials that no grant was certain to be available to the artists or arts groups that applied for it.

At issue was the council’s first opportunity to assess the effect on NEA operations of an unprecedented shift in budget priorities--enacted by Congress 10 days ago--that increases the proportion of money the endowment is required to distribute to state arts councils.

Under the new congressional formula, states will receive a larger percentage of block grants during the next few years. In the last several years, 20% of the NEA’s budget has been sent to state arts councils; that amount will be increased to 32.5% in 1991 and 35% in 1993. The increased state allotment will include a new competitive grant program for which only state agencies may apply. The NEA is to get a total of $174.5 million this year.

In budget figures distributed at the two-day National Council on the Arts meeting that ended here Saturday, NEA fiscal officials indicated that the amount of funds shifting to the states will total $11.9 million this year. That figure is nearly $1 million more than senior NEA officials estimated last week.

After allowing for administrative and other costs, this means that grant money available to everything from sculptors, painters and musicians to museums and symphony orchestras--the backbone of the 25-year-old federal arts program--will probably be cut by 13%.

The picture was anything but clear, however. As the weekend wore on, senior NEA officials contradicted views of the heads of some of the NEA’s core programs who said they were under the impression that cuts resulting from shifting additional funds to the states would roll evenly across all NEA divisions. Senior NEA officials disputed that interpretation.

By the end of the weekend, it seemed that the National Endowment for the Arts might re-emerge as much more of a traditional federal bureaucracy than the idiosyncratic agency it has been for the last quarter of a century.

The 26-member council scheduled a two-day retreat to be held sometime next month to determine how to restructure the arts endowment. The council adopted a resolution emphasizing that grant money approved over the weekend was subject to change, even elimination, pending restructuring of grant programs.

While the shape of the new NEA still lacked clarity, several impressions emerged:

* In the redirection of money to state arts councils, some NEA program budgets will be reduced far more than others. Late Saturday, NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer said that the arts endowment will have no choice but to implement selective and disproportionate reductions.

* Entire NEA programs could be eliminated altogether. Julie Davis, the endowment’s general counsel, said none of the individual NEA grants approved at the weekend session were certain. Some programs in which grants were voted by the arts council may no longer exist after Frohnmayer and top endowment officials complete their deliberations, she explained.

* There is also the prospect that Frohnmayer and directors of major NEA programs might transfer to the expanded new category of state arts agency support any part of a program that gives grants to the states now.

Late Saturday, when an NEA program official told arts council members that state arts agencies would receive $1.9 million of $16.5 million in challenge grants being voted on, Utah architect Ray Kingston, a member of the arts council, proposed that those grants simply be reassigned to the new state art support program.

For a moment, there was amused silence around the conference table. Then someone said quietly, “Ray, I like that.”

* On a more fundamental level, redirecting more funds to state arts councils could result in a radical restructuring of the federal arts agency. The NEA now awards grants in 16 discipline-based programs--including such categories as dance, design arts, literature, museums, music, theater and visual arts. For nearly two weeks, program directors and their assistants have been studying the arts agency’s priorities, at Frohnmayer’s direction, with an eye to focusing on five new priorities, it was learned Sunday. These focus areas would be international arts programs, rural arts initiatives, arts-in-education, multicultural activities and so-called “core institutions,” a term for the largest and most established cultural organizations. Core institution programs focus on symphonies, museums, opera companies and theaters with the biggest budgets and the broadest support systems.

The concern among many here was that the NEA might abandon individual artists and cutting-edge organizations that are both its neediest constituencies and potentially the most controversial the agency funds.

Frohnmayer tried to reassure artists against such a possibility. Individual fellowships will not be threatened with elimination or devastation, he said. “I am very committed to access and that often happens through some of the smallest organizations.